Gabe Polsky’s documentary Red Army opens with the film’s main subject – former NHL and Soviet hockey great Viacheslav (Slava) Fetisov – giving the finger to Polsky while checking his phone. At the film’s…

Still Alice is a window into the lives of the millions of people living with Alzheimer’s disease.
Icon FilmJanuary 28 2015

For many of us, memories are our most precious possessions; they makes us the people we are. Consider how you would feel then if your memories were stripped from you, as they are from people diagnosed…

“Life is a losing proposition,” explains Mark Wahlberg’s literature professor/compulsive gambler Jim Bennett. “You might as well get it over with.” Intent on doing just that, Bennett runs up massive debts…

Recently, Angelina Jolie announced her retirement from the acting profession so that she could take up writing and directing full time. Which is an error, if her latest directing endeavour Unbroken is…

At about the midway point of Interstellar, a spacecraft descends into the atmosphere of a pristine white planet. Gliding downwards, the tip of the craft brushes against a cloud, and the cloud shatters…

Ida and Wanda on their hunt through history.
Artificial EyeSeptember 30 2014

It was a matinee screening in a small town in Massachusetts. I’d stayed for the credits, feeling an odd need to confirm that I’d heard Dido on the soundtrack. Only one other person had been in the cinema…

I sing this song. I sing it for my sisters. For I feel the backbone of our struggle in this country, Trying to keep it together. Koori Woman – Marlene Cummins Rachel Perkins’ latest documentary, Black…

One of the big attractions at the Melbourne International Film Festival this year is Frank Pavich’s documentary Jodorowsky’s Dune (2013). The film retells the story of cult Chilean director Alejandro Jodorowsky’s…

By telling the stories of Boni, Titi and Ho, Jalanan brings to the screen the hardships and precarious lives of marginalised people in one of the most economically promising Asian countries.
Courtesy of Jalanan Movie TeamAugust 8 2014

Daniel Ziv’s documentary feature Jalanan (Streetside), currently screening at the Melbourne International Film Festival, is a film that seeks to move its audience. Documentaries sometimes invite viewers…

Australian poet and dramatist Christopher Barnett is the subject of These Heathen Dreams, a documentary screening at MIFF.
MIFFAugust 7 2014

I met the Australian poet Christopher Barnett in Nantes in 2009. He strode the narrow streets in his long leather coat, occasionally crossing the road in front of cars, staring drivers down. When I asked…

New Indian documentary cinema: Children of the Pyre.
MIFFAugust 7 2014

Rajesh Jala’s Children of the Pyre (2008) is one of seven documentary features in the India in Flux: Living Resistance strand at the 2014 Melbourne International Film Festival (MIFF). The film is a finely…

A still from Pablo Mazzolo’s Photooxidation, one of the films on the Experimental Shorts program at MIFF.
MIFFAugust 6 2014

The nine films that comprise the Melbourne International Film Festival’s Experimental Shorts program confront viewers with questions about image, form and genre. The Experimental Shorts program is an annual…

Marion Cotillard stars in Two Days, One Night, currently screening at the Melbourne International Film Festival.
MIFFAugust 5 2014

Audiences familiar with Belgian directors Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardennes won’t need any recommendation to see their latest film, Two Days, One Night, which is on the program of the Melbourne International…

Rinko Kikuchi stars in Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter, currently screening at the Melbourne International Film Festival.
MIFFAugust 4 2014

For the most part we live in disenchanted times: everyday life and the political landscape seem increasingly dried of their magical possibilities. Instead they are filled with dross and drone, the relentless…

I’m trying to figure out why I’m so disheartened with the movies this summer. It’s true that the season began badly. Marc Webb’s The Amazing Spider-Man 2 was a disappointment. The aerial sequences at the…

Brave New Clan presents the “X-factor” us mob see among ourselves all the time to a wider audience.
Foxtel 2014July 11 2014

The Sydney Film Festival Offical Competition this year has featured a range of male (and a few female) protagonists who are either without domicile, or whose domicile is severely threatened. I have already…

For me the most exciting way to negotiate the ample program of the Sydney Film Festival (SFF) is to focus on its retrospectives, and this year the lens is on the American film directors Robert Altman and…